I'm glad there's been interest. Got to admit, I was a bit anxious with it being my first article and all.
Andrew Peterson (4/20/2009)
Step One - get a server.Most people need to see it to believe it. No matter what the topic.
So, rather than spend time justifying a new server, I take the 'show them' route...
A Do'er!
Andrew Peterson (4/20/2009)
Follow up:For those not wanting to learn and/or write ASP web pages, I highly suggest you consider using SSRS as the reporting tool. You have less control with the vanilla framework, but its up and running fast. ~ But, Drew's ASP.net approach will look better and will be more impressive.
Of course it will. 😀
sean hawkes (4/20/2009)
On the flip side, I am going to use this as an excuse to get back into coding so I really can't wait.Sean
Wise move. I think that was originally why I decided to write them in ASP.Net. The thing with using reporting services is that there is always a possibility that 6 months or a year down the line, you think of this great report to do, but realise after a bit of research that it's just too tedious to do in SSRS or it can't be done at all because, as Andrews says it's vanilla. Over the last year many of the reports have been injected with steroids. For example, one of the articles to come is the Test Restore report, that consists of two pages. One page to set up which databases on which servers I want restoring to the Test Server, and another to tell me the outcome of restores.
Set up what we want restoring when and where to:
Last nights outcome:
In the background, we're using .Net and T-SQL to copy the databases across the network, specify which backup sets to restore and so on...
Another report is not a report at all, but an auditing page that allows me to record any work done on any server, upload attachments used etc.
Bill Scott (4/20/2009)
We did something like this at a previous employer. We ended up monitoring so many servers and so many processes we had a consolidated display with stoplights. Green lights for the things that went according to schedule, yellow if there was a nonfatal, and the loudest meanest red for when things went bad....
That's so cool. You didn't take a copy with you, did ya? 🙂
Bill Scott (4/20/2009)
heck, we even went so far as to set up monitoring on all the monitoring programs 🙂
Yes, to come in article Part 6! It's no good having a monitoring system if the jobs that trigger the monitoring system themselves fail.
Incidently, there are many online vb.net to c# convertors for the c#'ers, but I can supply the scripts in C# if you want.
Thanks to all, speak to you soon.
Drew